Of Tragedy, Poetry, Fiction, and Thought

David Farrell Krell reflects on nine writers and philosophers, including Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot, and Holderlin, in a personal exploration of the meaning of sensual love, language, tragedy, and death. The moon provides a unifying image that guides Krell's development of a new poetics in which literature and philosophy become one.

Krell pursues important philosophical motifs such as time, rhythm, and desire, through texts by Nietzsche, Trakl, Empedocles, Kafka, and Garcia Marquez. He surveys instances in which poets or novelists explicitly address philosophical questions, and philosophers confront literary texts—Heidegger's and Derrida's appropriations of Georg Trakl's poetry, Blanchot's obsession with Kafka's tortuous love affairs, and Garcia Marquez's use of Nietzsche's idea of the Eternal Return—all linked by the tragic hero Empedocles.

In his search to understand the insatiable desire for completeness that patterns so much art and philosophy, Krell investigates the identification of the lunar voice with woman in various roles—lover, friend, sister, shadow, and narrative voice.

Preface1: The Sensuality of Tragedy, the Tragedy of SensualityAntiquity and Modernity: The Epochal Suspension of EmpedoclesTime, Tragic Downgoing, AffirmationSensual Tragedy, Tragic Sensuality2: Stuff. Thread. Point. Fire: Holderlin's DissolutionThe Reproductive ActThe Bypassed TerminusAt the Burning PointDigression on Heidegger and InnigkeitHyperbollipsis3: The Source of the Wave: Rhythm in the Languages of Poetry and ThinkingAntiphonThe Animating WaveFettersSaxifrageRhythms of Presencing and Absencing4: The Lunar Voice of the SisterThe Selenic Situation of the SisterUpon the Being and Breast of a GirlThe Generation of the UnbornEvil Most Furious. Dissension between Brother and SisterHow to Gain a Sister?In (the) Place of GodOne Geschlecht: (S)he-lovers, Sea-lovers5: "I, an Animal of the Forest...": Blanchot's KafkaThe Feminine World and Literary AmbiguityThe Animal Kingdom of the WriterSolitude, Silence, and the SisterThe Narrative VoiceAn Incarnation Openly Bearing Its EmptinessThe BurrowThe Moss6: Lunar Solitudes: The Eternal Return of Gabriel Garcia MarquezEternal Recurrence? of the Same?Solitudes of Love and RancorThe Solitude of ParchmentIndex

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